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unaccountable

UK/ˌʌnəˈkaʊntəbl̩/US/ˌʌnəˈkaʊntəbl̩/
adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,595 of 15,258neutral

Unaccountable means impossible to explain. An unaccountable delay, for some unaccountable reason, unaccountable behaviour.

It also has a quite different political sense: an unaccountable body is one that answers to nobody, which is a criticism rather than a puzzle. Context settles which is meant, and the two rarely appear near each other.

Definitions of unaccountable

  1. 1adjectiveunaccountableImpossible to explain.C1

    “Her sudden, unaccountable anger surprised everyone at the table.”

unaccountable is a quality.

Where it comes from

From un- + accountable.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

unaccountable in the wild

  • The TECs were largely unaccountable and the basis of operation varied greatly from area to area.

    Training and enterprise council

  • At the beginning, the patient may realize that the hallucination is a morbid phenomenon and unaccountable.

    Chronic hallucinatory psychosis

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • account
  • accountant
  • accountable
  • accountancy
  • accountability